MoSCoWi

MoSCoWi is a hypothetical open standard for metropolitan-scale wireless networking. It enables self-organizing, multi-hop mesh networks that cover urban areas using commodity Wi-Fi hardware and software-defined routing.

Technical overview: Each MoSCoWi node runs a lightweight agent that participates in a distributed routing protocol. The protocol maintains neighbor tables, discovers routes, and adapts to changing link quality. The network uses an overlay on top of IEEE 802.11, allowing both APs and client devices to forward traffic. A key feature is multihop path discovery and redundancy to improve resilience. The implementation emphasizes low-cost deployment, energy efficiency, and ease of administration.

Origins and development: MoSCoWi was proposed in academic circles as a flexible city-wide Wi-Fi mesh standard. Initial work focused on scalable route discovery, traffic scheduling, and interference management in dense urban topologies. Researchers have demonstrated MoSCoWi in simulations and small pilot testbeds, and a reference implementation or toolkit, MoSCoWi-OS, was released under an open-source license.

Deployment and use: Potential applications include municipal broadband, disaster response communications, and university campuses. Benefits include reduced infrastructure costs and robustness to single-point failures, but challenges include spectrum management, privacy, security, and regulatory constraints on multihop wireless transmissions.

See also: Mesh networking, Community networks, Software-defined networking.